Boston Dynamics' New Rolling, Leaping Robot Is an Evolutionary Marvel

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Boston Dynamics' New Rolling, Leaping Robot Is an Evolutionary Marvel

If you're ever feeling down, do yourself a favor and watch some footage from the 2015 Darpa Robotics Challenge. This competition of bipedal beasts put robots up against a number of challenges, from turning valves to driving a car. But they struggled to open doors, much less stand for a decent amount of time. The verdict? Our face-planting future robotic overlords could stand some improvements.

Oh, how the world laughed. And oh, how the world gasped when Boston Dynamics dropped a video of its newest bot, Handle, this week. It's also a biped—but with wheels instead of feet, screaming around a building and leaping four feet high and doing pirouettes because why the hell not.

Handle isn’t just a startling reminder that highly sophisticated robots are here and stealing jobs, but that humans can create robotic forms superior to anything you’ll find in nature. And I’m not just talking about strength. What Boston Dynamics has done with Handle is take what natural selection has crafted—the human form—and turned it into a more efficient chimera. It’s created an evolutionary marvel.

Don’t get me wrong—the human body is a masterpiece of evolution. Walking on two legs frees up our hands, for one, allowing us to manipulate our environment. But it also has its drawbacks. Two legs are far less stable than four. That's not so much a problem for humans with years of practice, but a serious problem if you’re trying to build a bipedal robot that doesn’t fall on its face.

Should you crack that problem, though, you have a machine that can navigate a world built for humans like a human. It can climb stairs and open doors. Hell, it could even drive a car if need be. Creating robots in our image is part egomania, sure, but it’s more about inventing machines that could one day explore places made for bipeds. For instance, taking care of your grandma in her two-story house.

Would Handle be good at that sort of thing? Probably not—just you try climbing stairs on rollerblades. (Boston Dynamics did not reply to a request for comment. About the robot, not the rollerblades.) But if Boston Dynamics’ video is any indication, its form would do nicely in a warehouse as a heavy lifter or patrolling with soldiers as a kind of pack animal. (The US military wanted the firm’s "BigDog" quadruped for such a purpose, but rejected it in 2015 because it was too noisy.) And really, no one robot will be a universal solution. Wheeled bots are great on wide open plains, tracked robots rock when traversing rubble, and bipeds rule buildings built for people.

But what about a robot that can transform itself for each environment? “We can wear various contraptions to allow us to skate on ice, go underwater for days at a time, and even fly to the moon,” says roboticist Jerry Pratt of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. But we take those skates and space suits off when we return indoors. “It would be great to see a version of the Boston Dynamics Handle robot that can roll around fast on city streets but then take off its wheels and walk inside a building.”

Indeed, it was a hybrid robot that won the Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015. South Korea's DRC-HUBO looked like a humanoid, but could actually kneel and scoot around on wheels. And it crushed the competition of almost entirely bipedal humanoids. “They won so much time by going over flat terrain with wheels that they had this huge advantage,” says roboticist Hanumant Singh of Northeastern University. “I think [Handle] is somewhat of a reaction to that.”

What’s remarkable about Handle is that it has essentially one-upped evolution. Natural selection never saw fit to give a mammal wheels, for obvious reasons—you’d need a motor and bearings and a perfectly flat world and let’s face it I don’t need to tell you why natural selection never invented the wheel. But wheels are extremely energy-efficient. So much so that Boston Dynamics claims Handle can travel 15 miles on a charge. Just imagine a bipedal robot trying to stumble that far. (Boston Dynamics' Atlas bipedal robot manages about an hour on a charge.)

Handle is an academic robot for now, so don’t expect one for Christmas this year. But it represents something exhilarating: Humans are getting very, very good at taking the bipedalism that evolution gave us and not only replicating it in robots, but supercharging it to a quite honestly terrifying degree. Take that, Darwin.